Friends

At Paris CDG airport a few years ago, I made my only splurge in France other than a big, fluffy white sweater: a stack of tins of Anis de Flavigny in every flavor. These old-school candies are fashioned in a sustainable way. I imagine Marie Antionette popping these during a long soak in the bathtub (OK, that’s not a sustainable image, and forgive the insufferable “when I was in Europe” start to this post. Zzz.).

Records show that the treats were given to travelers in 1591, but they may have been around for centuries longer. Here’s what I could translate from their sweet site: The staff of 25 works out of the precious-looking village of Flavigny, in an abbey built in 718. They get anise seeds from Spain, Turkey and Syria, and then roll them around and around in sugar snowballing for about 15 days until forming one-gram pastille confections. They use real sugar instead of skimping with cheap-o corn syrup like most soda pop makers do. The mouth-watering Candy Blog paid tribute recently:

The pastille was often the work of a pharmacist or herbalist, not a confectioner. They started with seeds or herbs that were prescribed for various reasons (fever, digestion, impotence)… The most talented pharmacists made beautiful pastilles that looked like shimmering opalescent spheres and were kept as if they were treasures as well, inside ornate boxes, often locked by the lady of the household.

Well-crafted candy can be medicinal, a work of art. Mais quelle horreur! Much of the postmodern world has lost its taste for artisanal, all-natural confections. Look how the FDA may try to pass off cocoa butter as true chocolate (hurry up and petition the government by April 25!). Sustainable sweet stuff is important in light of the obesity epidemic. For instance, former President Clinton chose to focus his speech before a crowd of educators in San Francisco this week on how the ever-growing heft of American children could collapse our healthcare system in the coming decades. So go ahead, be a food snob.

I’ll continue to budget as much as several dollars a day for real, dark chocolate, 65 percent and up, and I’ll down anything with a floral scent. When traveling through Paris, Venice and Rome back in the day, I scarfed my way through cone after cup after petite cone of ice cream and gelato in violet, lavender and rose flavors. Not a bad budget diet at $2 a pop. (Starving? Let them eat cake cones!) And one of my favorite all-time meals was a lavender-flavored pasta dish around quirky Bolinas, California.

Don’t crinkle your nose; these flavors are really no more radical than rosemary or peppermint. You can grow them in your windowsill and toss them into stir fries and stews. And hooray, floral herbs are surfacing more lately in mainstream American cooking.

There's a lot of guilt-free jewelry around if you shop carefully. But what if you like to string your own beads and sculpt your own pendants? Here are some green supplies for making jewelry. I'm almost too late for Valentine's Day, but keep this in mind next time you're stringing beads or bending wire for your beloved (chow on happy chocolate here).

The Beaded Needle, the best source of links I've found on this subject, advises buying beads manufactured in the U.S., Czech Republic, Germany, Italy
and Japan because "all of these countries protect their workers." Glass beads from India or China? A big no-no (U.S. furnace glass artists such as David Christensen: yes, yes.). Yet even the popular Fire Mountain Gems fails to protect Chinese workers from fatal silicosis, says the L.A. Times. Insert comment here about how beauty shouldn't kill. After I received Fire Mountain's giant recycled paper catalog, which contains all sorts of information about the company's do-good deeds around breast cancer and so on, I e-mailed them asking about the eco- and human-friendliness of its goods. Two weeks later, haven't heard back.

Rings & Things sells some 20,000 items online or in a 300-page catalog, and the owner told Beaded Needle that the stone cutters he visited seemed ethical enough. The family-owned A Grain of Sand says it handpicks stones and silver.

When dealing with Swarovski and other high-quality crystal, don't chew on the beads or uh...stud a goblet or silver platter with them, since they contain lead. You might want to wash your hands after handling beads, chains and filings. Some beads are dyed, heated, and irradiated. A reputable supplier should label their goods accordingly as the FTC demands.

Don't worry about quartz crystal, though, since that's so natural that it can be shaped make sweet music (beware soundtrack) and bring out your inner shaman. Kacha's Celtic crystals are hand-mined. Earthly Gems says it cares about ethical sourcing. You can buy Discount Crystals NOW! at Healing Crystals, where they pray for your order but don't guarantee how the rocks were mined. Just don't let someone turn those crystals against you to control your mind...ohhh. I'm sure that isn't the case for Chrissy White's hardcore healing crystal jewelry, which she's shown at U.K. eco-design fairs.

I'm not big on jewelry. Note the $2 tin ring that I bought in Cozumel in high school my first trip out of North America. Other than that, I'll wear pieces that were worn or given by people I love.

But after a recent visit to an Oak Park, IL, bead store and the splurge it provoked, I'm left with hundreds of dollars' worth of unstrung Czech glass, Swarovski crystal, silver, wooden, dyed coral, wannabe pearl, jade, and vintage mid-century plastic beads, plus the wire and sterling clasps. I even spent a full day exploiting the worskhop table at an SF bead shop, crafting necklaces for my cousins for Christmas. While I waited two hours for a jump after my Zipcar battery died another day, I kept popping back into General Bead down the street, where the shopkeepers' rainbow hairdos match the beads.

But how sustainable is this jewelry hobby? For example, Swarovski crystals are supposed to be the best because of their high lead content, which sounds not so good, but how bad could it be? Are dyed beads a bad idea? Shoud you leave coral alone? Vintage jewelry is always a safe bet--best if you're lucky to get it handed down from family and friends. If you want to make your own pieces, you can buy box lots of broken pieces at estate auctions and yard sales. I'll be looking into the eco-friendliness of the ingredients you'll find at bead shops. In the meantime, here's the prettiest and greenest jewelry I've found:

You can see sunsets in the jasper and wear ancient history with the dinosaur bone fossils within Kirsten Muenster's strikingly modern, one-of-a-kind necklaces (left, above), rings, and bracelets. Lucina uses fair trade beads, such as Colombian red choclo seeds and vegetarian ivory, which add an earthy touch to the company's elegant, sparse pieces. How about an espresso pearl bracelet (below, right)? I also like 19 Moons' funky brooches (above, right), bracelets, and picture pendants, which embrace imagery from the Victorian and atomic eras. K. talis's North Carolina maker keeps old-fashioned, protective talismans in mind (right) when crafting wearable art from lost keys, shoe buckles, and other detritus. Viva Terra sells nice green jewelry, housewares, and other stuff. Vik Jewelry's fun Indio collection sources materials from Brazil, including dyed acai seeds (left) and feathers. Yvette Doss hand-crafts pendants (right) with semi-precious stones and recycled doodads such as Mexican milagros for her Yew Tree necklaces. By the Sea Jewelry uses softened sea glass in teal, seafoam, cherry and other hues. My favorite necklace pendant was a thousand year-old Roman coin I picked up in Jerusalem, but beware of looted and fake antiquities.

People make jewelry out of practically anything--like bike chains, gumball charms, and vinyl records. Verde Jewelry makes use of Timber Bamboo and vintage baubles (left). Transit tokens, dice, and Scrabble letters become cufflinks and rings thanks to tokens & coins(right). I used to glue quarters to my barrettes (don't ask). Japan's Harvest even sells jewelry made from old skateboards--supposedly. That part of the site is under construction. Israel's Ayala Bar costume jewelry involves lots of recycled goods. If you're making jewelry and need a sustainable silver source, Cloth of the Gods from Yellow Springs, OH (the original Twilight Zone) sells silver beads and more from tribes in Thailand.

Major jewelry sellers such as Tiffany & Co., and even Zales are signing on to support less brutal ways of mining precious gems and metals (Find out more from the Council for Responsible Jewellry Practices.). That won't stop companies' brutal marketing campaigns that shove diamonds in our faces. I couldn't think of a much emptier symbol of enduring love than a colorless cut rock. How about a blue sapphire instead?

Oops, I forgot; "mainstream media" I mean like, MSM, is so 1972. Isn't it our duty to cheer up? It's the dawn of the postpostmodern, postindustrial, post-oil century, which is a new beginning, which must be positive! We wouldn't want to turn off any jetsetting ecorazzi with ugh, more unglossy headlines about the downtrodden state of nature. C'mon, let's say Yippie (no Hoffman/Rubin overtones, for Gwyneth's sake) for our bright, clean, green energy future--for amber waves of organic quinoa, for fleets of veggie oil Mercedes road-tripping from sea to sea, for backyard wind turbines rustling the leaves of native prairie plants that we put up where parking lots used to be!

Y'all couldn't feel any more numb being reminded about the toxic stew that sank the third-world, subtropical boot-toe of this number-one nation, could you? Say one more word about how our citizens stewed and stank and starved last year because of criminal ecological neglect or whatever, and it'll spoil my salad. Who wants to lose an appetite about how manyother waters flow with poisons, and why "wars over wetlands" has such a nice ring to it? Can't we go without the gloomcasts about how shifting weather patterns will doom our shivering offspring to relentless wars over resources? So what if there aren't any fish left in the sea, or if teflon and flame retardants float in baby's bloodstream. Wouldn't you rather subscribe to happygrams about shopping in an ecologically-correct fashion, so you can make those little green choices mean a lot, day after day?

On the dim side, today's featured wager, placed by knighted astrophysicist Martin Rees, foresees that one event of bioterror or bioerror (rising "from inadvertance rather than evil intent") will wipe out a million souls by 2020. So far the odds are 50/50--the same odds Rees gives our species for lasting another century.

Other predictions are on the brighter side: Also within 14 years, could solar energy be as cheap as fossil fuels? Will the average household keep a room to make a self-sustaining water supply? Will we make huge strides toward clean energy within a decade? And when will people stop denying global warming? To add your wager to the public debate, just don't expect to get your money back; all proceeds will go to charity.

Good news
doesn't sell as well as bad news, and the "sky is falling"
sensationalism of environmental activists lead people to falsely believe that
our environment is getting worse when it's actually getting
better…Scare tactics and sensational rhetoric have enabled the top 30 organizations to generate billions in annual revenue, according to public documents. But how much of this money is spent on real, hands-on, "muddy boots" conservation work for the environment? Almost none.

The Committee's website is nothing more than
propaganda. Worse, it's false. Worse yet, it directly slanders
organizations that have long demonstrated their devotion to
conservation and environmental preservation.

Plastic is poison in so many ways. Take credit cards; it's not that they'd suddenly be eco-friendly if they were made of kenaf. Instead, credit cards seduce us to live unsustainably. One day you're signing up on campus to get a free teddy bear (ugh--mine wears a bomber jacket and goggles), the next thing you know you're swimming with dolphins in Cancun on a trip that you'll be paying off as a grandparent--if you can afford to have a family in the first place.

Your fault for spending as if MTV cared to film your life. Yet creditors sneer, gladly handing you a fatter line of borrowed money than you can possibly snort. They like you cracked out on consumer debt better than when you soberly pay them back. That's just their business, sort of like the paparazzi and Whitney Houston.

On top of that, your personally unsustainable lifestyle has global
ramifications. The road to easy credit is littered with landfills. When you
instantly gratify a whim by charging the latest, most incredibly shrinking iPod or whatever, you feed the myth that
newness is better than something borrowed or mended. The annoying cycle of mass consumption that we all bitch about but participate in keeps spinning like some fractal screensaver in a stoner's dorm room.

You spend more because you can, you
save less because you can't imagine the future, and soon there's
less cash in your kitty. You may no longer use credit cards just to keep up with the Joneses; falling incomes and rising debt mean that you're charging basics like gas, health care, and groceries. Creditors often gouge the neediest consumers with outlandish
interest rates, trapping them in this cycle.

What's my point? What can you do to escape consumer madness, beyond joining the Compact, observing Buy Nothing Day, or following tips from blogs such Frugal for Life? To start, ignore the zero-percent bait and just say no if you're about to get a new credit card--even one that donates to a needy cause. If you're already hooked, take out a more sustainable loan and pay it off. I don't mean a credit card, line of credit, mortgage, or family handout. Instead, consider Prosper or Zopa--peer-to-peer credit services that take banks out of the picture. You already use the web to trade music and movies, so it naturally follows that someone would turn the net into a P2P lending system.

Prosper encourages borrowers to join one of its groups, which can add street cred to a credit score. You can start your own group or join one of the nearly 600 clusters already created by veterans, doctors, college alumni, green-minded people, etc. Prosper and Zopa provide a democratic, off-the-grid alternative
to the consumer credit matrix, and have the potential to change the way
people borrow and dole out dollars. I'm curious to see how these services will develop, and if imitators will crop up. Maybe social networking sites will build a microlending feature into their community networks.

Was that signature chartreuse hue emanating from the eerie walls of Prada stores a Gilded 90's warning of the haute greenness set to overwhelm popular culture? Mass marketing and media outlets are glowing green, striving for a rosy ecological outlook. Even Superbowl ads were "super green" this year. Is this coolingtrend sustainable, or another bubble set to culture-pop?

Working behind the scenes in Hollywood, the Environmental Media Association gets star power to spotlight ecological issues. You'll soon see green beaming from checkout lines when Vanity Fair focuses on sustainability (and shoots green bloggers) for Earth Day, and a recycled-paper Elle features ecologically correct products when its May issue hits the stands in April.

As for the paperless world, if
you associate Steve Case only with the lame, CD-wasting AOL.com, you might rub your eyes at his Revolution venture, which declares, "Change will come, and we aim to accelerate it." Revolution is behind the Lime network, a window to a green world on the web, TV, and radio. The website features terrific wordsmiths like Amanda Griscom Little. Sirius satellite plays Lime content on radio channel 114, such as Danny Seo's "Simply Green," Josh Dorfman's "Lazy Environmentalist", and a plethora of self-helpy shows involving psychic/angel/miracle elements.

It's embarrassing that I joined Friendster years ago in a morbid bout of "where-are-they-now" curiosity, yet I was too square for the now-unkinkyTribe and I proudly raise my cane about skipping MySpace and Facebook. (Ha! it's also embarrassing that I misspelled "embarassing" for half the year in this post.) Ah, youngsters. Any term ending in "-ster" clogs my large intestine. Nevertheless, curious again, I'm outing myself for having signed up at Zaadz, a social networking site for cultural creatives, after a nice reader pointed it out. The profiles of 1,453 active "Zaadsters" each list two astrological signs--hence many stargazers/yogis/techies /Reiki-people/Burning Man devotees with interests that include green building, evolution, and felting. One guy describes himself as "a love light Padawan;" one woman calls herself a "psychoactive bodhisattva." Get it?

Will Zaddz' mission to fuse capitalism with world-changing attract swarms of green people? Zaadz is marked by an absence of cynicism, so even its form buttons are polite (right), but users such as this one gripe about censorship. To join, you must agree to either respect the "sacred space" or leave it. Hm. The site's only in private beta (testing) mode, so expect quirks. Tagging and other web 2.0 plans are in the works, as are hopes for Zaadz-branded spas and books. For now, you can peek at people and search a bank of quotes by some of "the world's greatest thinkers (59 of the 60 most-quoted are male)."